San Diego Zoo and Sea World in Wild Race for Visitors

They are the twin engines driving San Diego’s supercharged tourist economy and, in the process, shaping the city’s preferred image as a place devoted to family fun in the sun.

One is owned by a high-minded, nonprofit corporation, the other by a beer company, but more often than not they are linked in a common mantra posed to visitors: “Have you been to the zoo or Sea World yet?”

Or as one Midwestern travel agent put it, “To the outside world, the zoo and Sea World are San Diego.”

To the inside world, much the same could be said.

This is a city where zoo animals are known by name, and their arrivals, courtships and deaths are front-page news, where more people probably know the name Shamu than the name of their congressional representative.

There is also this offshoot of the Sea World-San Diego Zoo dynamic: a friendly but spirited competition each year to unveil the summer’s biggest blockbuster attraction and thereby lay claim as King of the Tourists.

Summer attractions are months in the planning and millions of dollars in the making, and advance details are guarded like military secrets.

“In the travel industry, this is called ‘arsenal wars,’ ” said Tim O’Brien, an editor at Amusement Business magazine. “All tourist sites need to keep the buzz going, and the tendency is to try to become the largest, biggest, fastest.”

Two years ago, the zoo unveiled Hippo Beach and Sea World launched Shamu’s Happy Harbor. Last year, it was Polar Bear Plunge and Shamu Backstage, respectively.

And last week, in much-trumpeted roll-out campaigns, Heart of Africa made its debut at the San Diego Zoo’s Wild Animal Park, and Wild Arctic opened for business at Sea World on Mission Bay.

No short-change attractions these. Heart of Africa and Wild Arctic are easily the biggest, boldest and most innovative attractions either site has developed.

Heart of Africa is a 30-acre “themed experience” done up to look like an African safari, complete with cracked mud pathways, close-up looks at monkeys, hoofed stock, aardvarks, multiple species of birds and, in a break with zoo tradition, a chance to hand-feed the giraffes. (Sea World two years ago began letting patrons touch the orcas and dolphins.)

Wild Arctic--a duplicate of an attraction at Sea World in Florida--is 82,000 square feet of a movie lot-style environment with polar bears, beluga whales, walruses, harbor seals and more, set amid a faux research station. Think Universal Studios with marine mammals.

If you guessed that both venues have gift shops stocked with attraction-specific T-shirts, stuffed animals, mugs, books and other buy-me-daddy-buy-me items, you’ve begun to catch on.

There are reasons for the pell-mell rush to tourism season this particular summer.

For one, the revived national economy has the tourism industry sensing a bonanza season (this after a 5% increase in San Diego last year). For another, regional competition is fierce and getting fiercer.

“One of the more significant trends has been for beach and ocean resorts to lose business to more entertainment-based destinations,” said Jim Cammisa, editor of a Miami-based travel industry newsletter. “You either have to put some theater into your destination or fall behind.”

That warning is not lost on San Diego County, where tourism is a $4-billion-a-year industry, ranking behind only manufacturing and the military as an economic behemoth.

“Of tourist cities, only Las Vegas and Orlando (home to Disney World) don’t have to worry,” said David Nuffer, San Diego publicist and president of the San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau. “The rest of us have to compete.”

Part of competition is publicity, and the zoo and Sea World began their summer public relations offensives last week, with media tours, sneak previews and advertising blitzes, culminating in dueling grand openings Saturday.

The zoo has a three-part television commercial with music from the movie “Out of Africa.” It also has a secret weapon: a companion commercial with the top mammalian attraction of all, pandas (“One who eats bamboo will steal your heart”) on long-term loan from Beijing.

Sea World is but a half-step behind. Its swimming polar bear commercial for Wild Arctic is fetching, and, in a coup of sorts, Sea World arranged for Julia Sweeney, the comic best known for the androgynous Pat character on “Saturday Night Live,” to emcee the attraction’s debut bash.

Truth be told, tourism officials say that the choice between the zoo and Sea World is not an either/or dilemma for most visitors. Many attend both, or even both zoo locations, Balboa Park near downtown and the Wild Animal Park, as well as Sea World--the trifecta of tourism.

“Sure we compete with Sea World,” said Amelia Brazell, director of marketing for the San Diego Zoological Society. “But we also cooperate” in joint advertising and promotions put together by the convention and visitors bureau.

The bureau makes much of the zoo and Sea World in its advertising, which attracts 14 million visitors a year. “They are the icons we sell to attract visitors to San Diego,” said bureau official Lynn Mohrfeld.

The zoological society says that 3 million people a year visit the zoo at Balboa Park and 1.5 million visit the Wild Animal Park, set in the San Pasqual Valley 25 miles north of downtown San Diego.

Sea World, owned by Anheuser-Busch, does not release attendance figures, but Amusement Business estimated its 1996 attendance at 3.89 million. Anyone who has gone to Sea World on a summer weekend would not disagree.

Of the two new attractions, Heart of Africa is the more subtle, the more grounded in verisimilitude, offering a three-quarter-mile stroll through dense forest, savannas and open plains. Visitors are given a guidebook in lieu of explanatory signs. Contemplation of nature’s wonders is encouraged. “We changed some of the exhibtry elements to simulate the wild environment,” said Randy Rieches, curator of mammals at the Wild Animal Park.

One touch is a Land Rover stuck in a mud bog, a common problem for safarists. Near the end of the path is a mock-up of a working research center to be staffed by researchers eager to talk about the zoo’s conservation efforts worldwide.

Wild Arctic is jazzier, louder, more revved-up, unabashedly theme park-esque. Visitors begin in a simulated helicopter ride aboard White Thunder and arrive in an enclosed top-of-the-world environment where the dominant feature is a simulated shipwreck.

Children are encouraged to crawl through a simulated polar bear ice cave. At the appropriate moment a recording of a bear’s roar does its scary thing. Fun is foremost, but education lurks.

“You can’t help but learn something about the Arctic and animals here,” said Bill Winhall, assistant curator of mammals at Sea World. “You’re immersed in it.”

Beyond just the newly blossoming economy and the increased competitive nature of the tourism industry, there may be yet another reason for this summer’s extravaganza. Can you spell D-i-s-n-e-y?

Disney Corp. is building its 500-acre Animal Kingdom in Orlando, Fla., set to open in 1998. Disney has hired away San Diego Zoo personnel to help with its project; in the name of conservation, the zoo is presenting Disney with rare animals for its collection.

Like a Jurassic Park dinosaur whose huge footstep makes the ground tremble long before it comes into view, the impact of Disney’s first venture into displaying live animals is being felt.

Although San Diego and Florida are not in heavy geographic competition for the same tourist market, it’s a tourism truism that wherever Disney treads, be it movies, theme parks or other ventures, it leaves a mark, often setting an industry standard against which others are measured.

“Disney will raise the bar for all of us,” Mohrfeld said.

Which is not to say, of course, that Disney has not already done a lot to influence how people look at animals.

“It’s incredible how the (Disney movie) ‘Lion King’ changed the public’s perception of wart hogs,” Rieches said.